Author Archives: Dana Pico

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“No one is above the law.” — Joe Biden Unless, of course, it's immigration law, and then our good friends on the left support breaking the law!

We have previously noted how The Philadelphia Inquirer’s radical left columnist Will Bunch was adamant in his support for legality, railing against President Trump’s pardon of the January 6th Capitol kerfufflers, even though the vast majority of them had already been punished, already served their sentences, his indignation over the United States sinking drug trafficking boats rather than arresting the drug traffickers, and, as we reported last June, his support for illegal immigrant and accused wife beater Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Mr Bunch even said that he did not “like” President Biden’s final flurry of pardons “at all,” though he claimed that “they were understandable” to protect critics of then-incoming President Trump. Clearly, Mr Bunch believed the Democrats mantra of “no one is above the law,” used when they were trying to throw Mr Trump in prison.

But now, it seems that Mr Bunch has changed his tune. To him, some people clearly are above the law, those people being ones who have violated our immigration laws:

In New Orleans and across U.S., anger over ICE raids sparks a 2nd American Revolution

Everyday folks are rising up to resist immigration raids with whistles, car chases, and noisy protests. Revolution is in the air.

By Will Bunch | Pearl harbor Day, December 7, 2025 | 2:24 PM EST

NEW ORLEANS — In a city of frayed nerves over an invasion by more than 200 masked, tactical-gear-wearing federal immigration agents, a chaotic scene suddenly broke out right in front of the altar at First Grace United Methodist Church on Canal Street, just a couple of miles from the Superdome.

There follow several paragraphs noting that this was not the real thing, but a rehearsal for activists to disrupt actual immigration law enforcement.

This was a play-acting, casual-dress rehearsal during an emergency training session organized by the immigration-rights group Union Migrante. The activists were planting more seeds for what is rapidly sprouting as the most important American uprising of the 21st century.

It took about 66 hours to go from basic training to frontline action. On Friday afternoon, in a heavily Latino neighborhood near the New Orleans airport, the cartoon-villainous, strutting Border Patrol commander of the Louisiana immigration raids named “Catahoula Crunch,” Greg Bovino, struggled to conduct a sweep through blocks of low-slung apartments.

Word that Bovino and his masked secret police were in suburban Kenner spread quickly on a series of chat groups of activists who’ve played cat-and-mouse with his agents ever since their op began Wednesday, tailing government SUVs across superstore parking lots and down boulevards lined with strip malls.

Eventually, according to the local newspaper, The Times-Picayune, the caravan of citizen resisters following the agents grew to as many as 30 vehicles, until Bovino-friendly cops from the Kenner Police Department formed a blockade to stop them. That didn’t deter other neighbors who, as captured on video, chased the masked feds across lawns while filming with cell phones and blowing shrill whistles, a signal for immigrants to stay indoors.

In other words, the activists were attempting to disrupt and interfere with a legitimate immigration law enforcement action. Some people apparently are above the law!

You can feel the sheltering impulses of the antebellum Underground Railroad, combined with the righteous fervor of 1964’s Mississippi Freedom Summer. I spent much of last week in and around New Orleans, the resiliently rebellious heart of one of America’s reddest states. I watched everyday folks protest on street corners, create “Know Your Rights” pamphlets, and learn how to legally confront masked, armed law-enforcement officers. Nearing the end of a year that began with the grim inauguration of authoritarianism, I left here convinced I’d seen the green shoots of a second American Revolution.

Heaven forfend! “(A) second American Revolution”? I suppose that Mr Bunch would be in favor of anything that might get rid of our freely and legally elected President, but revolutions frequently do not turn out quite the way people expected. Our first, and hopefully only, American Revolution brought forth a nation of individual rights, freedom, and democracy, but most recent revolutions have produced authoritarianism, suppression of dissent, and dictatorship. Remember: our previous President tried to impose mandatory administration of a vaccine approved only on an emergency basis, pushed social media such as (pre-Elon Musk) Twitter and Facebook to censor posts the Administration didn’t like, and tried to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board. Even The Grey Lady, our nation’s most famous newspaper, The New York Times, was giving OpEd space to those who wanted to restrict Other People’s — certainly not their own! — Freedom of Speech and of the Press.

However, I followed Mr Bunch’s link to the Times-Picayune, and found something somewhat different than the Inquirer columnist told his readers:

In Kenner, Border Patrol leader Gregory Bovino faces mixed reactions and police backup

By Lara Nicholson, Staff writer | Friday, December 5, 2025

As the U.S. Border Patrol conducted their third day of immigration raids in the New Orleans area, Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino, the agency’s leader, toured the streets of Kenner Friday to mixed reaction from the public, taking photo ops at one point to fielding protesters at another before ultimately using a Kenner Police blockade to leave the area.

Bovino and a team of at least six agents conducted operations at gas stations and in neighborhoods along Williams Boulevard, the main corridor of the city lined with Latin American restaurants and department stores. At one point Bovino’s team approached a vehicle at a gas station to question a passenger before letting him go. It’s unclear if they detained anyone on Friday.

Bovino and his entourage wore green uniforms and face coverings, and he dismissed a request Friday from New Orleans Mayor-Elect Helena Moreno, a Democrat, that federal agents remove masks as part of a broader demand for more transparency.

“I think this is about as transparent as it gets right here,” Bovino told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune in response to Moreno’s demands.

But in Kenner, a suburban city of about 65,000, the political landscape is much different from its more progressive anchor. While having the largest Hispanic population per capita of any Louisiana city at 30%, its government is almost entirely Republican. Its police chief, Keith Conley, has in recent years complained about the increase in undocumented immigrants and is one of the only officials in the parish that’s been a vocal supporter of Border Patrol’s efforts in the city.

While New Orleans/Orleans Parish, the murder capital of the United States, gave 130,749 votes, or 82.16%, to then-Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024, and only 24,119, 15.16%, to then-former and now current President Donald Trump, Mr Trump carried Jefferson Parish, in which Kenner is the largest city, 98,810, or 55.45%, to 75,731, 42.50%, for Mrs Emhoff. Overall, Mr Trump carried Louisiana 1,208,505, 60.22%, to 766,870, 38.21%. Note that Mr Bunch reported that the activists were training at First Grace United Methodist Church on Canal Street, just a couple of miles from the Superdome, in New Orleans itself; the activists protesting in Kenner were mostly not from Kenner.

The Times-Picayune again:

At a Star Gas Station on Williams Boulevard where Bovino’s team stopped for a break, customers asked to take pictures with him while he waited to purchase pork cracklins and an energy drink. He offered to buy one of them their coke while a gaggle of photojournalists took pictures.

In the parking lot outside, a man in a camouflage jacket and a red “Make America Great Again” hat held up a makeshift metal sign saying “THANK YOU I.C.E ❤︎ U D.H.S. U.S.A!” in blue paint.

“We love you and we work for you,” Bovino told the man before entering his SUV.

Our frantic Philadelphian somehow didn’t include that in his column; perhaps he didn’t actually read all of the news report he cited?

Freed of the old constraint of 750 words, Mr Bunch continued, but if you read it, you’ll see that he was reporting on ‘resistance’ from New Orleans, which even he noted was but a “Democratic dot in a state that Trump won with 60% of the vote in 2024.”

One last bit from him:

In Charlotte, the Bovino-led operation dubbed “Charlotte’s Web,” which was also met with widespread community opposition, was abruptly cut short after just four-and-a-half days.

As my good friend and occasional website pinch hitter William Teach reported Monday morning, a previously, 2018 under President Trump, deported illegal immigrant who sneaked back in in 2021, under President Biden, was just arrested for stabbing a man in the chest on Charlotte’s light rail system, the same public transportation system in which Decarlos Brown — not an illegal immigrant, but a mentally ill man with dozens of previous arrests — (allegedly) murdered Iryna Zarutska.

Perhaps Mr Bunch never heard of the murder of Miss Zarutska, given that a site search of the Inquirer’s website foe “Iryna Zarutska” turned up zero results. Had Mr Brown been white and Miss Zarutska black or Hispanic, you can bet your last euro that it would have been all over the Inky.

Perhaps if our friends on the left in general, and Mr Bunch specifically, included our immigration laws and street crime under “no one is above the law” we’d have a safer society.
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Even The New York Times has admitted that Ukraine is slowly losing

On December 2nd, Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, told us what a terrible thing it would be if President Trump’s peace proposal for Ukraine gave up too much to Vladimir Putin and Russia.

On Saturday morning, the Opinion section of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website highlighted four pro-Ukrainian articles by columnist Trudy Rubin, who has been beating the drums hard for support of Ukraine. We have previously noted Mrs Rubin’s continuing attempts to support Ukraine, as well as David J Kramer, Executive Director of the George w Bush Institute and Vice President of the George W Bush Presidential Center, arguing that the only legitimate peace plan for Ukraine is a demand, “Russia, Get out of Ukraine!”

We can all wish that President Putin hadn’t ordered invasions of Ukraine, in 2014 and again in 2022. We can all wish that Ukraine’s territory was strong and inviolable. But sometimes what we wish were the case, and reality on the ground, are two very different things. From The New York Times:

Battlefield Picture Worsening for Ukraine as Trump Pushes Peace Plan

Russian forces have advanced on several fronts recently. President Vladimir V. Putin signaled after talks with U.S. officials that he was not budging from demands.

By Cassandra Vinograd, Oleksandr Chubko, and Maria Varenikova, Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine | Saturday, December 6, 2025 | Updated: 2:54 PM EST

It was a clear attempt to project Russian power.

Hours before meeting U.S. officials in Moscow this past week about their plan to end the war, President Vladimir V. Putin claimed that Russia’s forces had seized the strategic Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk after a monthslong fight.

The reality was murkier. Slivers of the city were still contested, according to battlefield maps and the Ukrainian military. But Mr. Putin’s claim, even if premature, reflected a trend shaping his unbending approach to negotiations: Russian forces are on the march.

“The Russians do have the upper hand,” said Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst with the Finland-based Black Bird Group. Ukraine is not yet at the point where it must capitulate, he said, but it “is looking weak enough that the Russians think that they can impose demands.”

Mr. Putin has ordered the Russian military to prepare for winter combat, signaling after the talks with U.S. officials that he is not budging from his hard-line demands. President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has since held a series of discussions in Miami with Ukraine’s delegation that both sides called “constructive.”

The pace of Russian advances remains slow, but they have increased recently. Russia gained roughly 267 square kilometers of territory in October, and 505 km² in November. No one believes that Russia can suddenly ‘win’ the war in the next few months, but there is also little hope that Ukraine can reverse the recent losses on the ground.

At the same time, Russia is using drones to attack Ukraine’s infrastructure, including power plants, as winter begins to set in in a naturally cold land. Russian soldiers will be as affected as those of Ukraine by the cold blasts of Морозко — Father Frost — but many of Ukraine’s civilians will start to feel the same thing. Europe’s civilians will not have that problem, thanks in significant part to their purchases of natural gas from Russia! While we have previously reported on The Wall Street Journal’s article “European Leaders Warn Zelensky to Be Wary in U.S. High-Speed Push for Peace,” more and more people will die the longer this continues.

The issue is manpower, something The Washington Post was reporting on a year ago, and, absent American and/or NATO ground troops going into Ukraine and directly fighting the Russians, is not going to change. We have previously noted how so many, many people want to fight for Ukraine, but they’re doing so in protest marches in Philadelphia rather than picking up a rifle and heading to Ukraine to fight.

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World War III Watch Wouldn't it be great if the Europeans could offer a real peace deal that didn't threaten to start World War III?

Our good European friends in NATO are very, very concerned that President Trump is going to negotiate a peace deal, or at least a ceasefire, between Russian President Vladimir Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy that won’t be as favorable to Ukraine as they’d like, or, more accurately, too favorable to Russia. However, the European NATO nations have had 3¾ years to work out a peace deal more to their liking, and have been unable to do so. More, President Trump has only been in office for 10½ months; no one could seem to negotiate a peace while Joe Biden was President either.

President Trump wants peace, and always has. Some of those who dislike Mr Trump claim that he’s only doing this to try to win the Nobel Peace prize, something we all know he will never do, but really, what difference does that make if he can somehow achieve peace?

From The Wall Street Journal:

European Leaders Warn Zelensky to Be Wary in U.S. High-Speed Push for Peace

Ukrainian leader must secure a solid pledge from Washington before conceding to Russian demands, his counterparts caution

By Laurence Norman and Noemie Bisserbe | Thursday, December 4, 2025 | 3:19 PM EST

BERLIN—In recent days, European leaders have delivered a stark warning to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: Don’t give in to Russian demands without ironclad security commitments from the U.S.

The message reflects European leaders’ growing wariness of Washington’s high-speed effort to reach a peace deal that has left them on the sidelines.

In particular, European leaders have advised their Ukrainian counterpart to nail down America’s role in security guarantees for Kyiv before accepting Russian demands, according to two European diplomats familiar with the discussions.

This message was delivered on a call Monday between Zelensky and European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the diplomats said. The European leaders insisted on the primacy of the U.S. role in security guarantees offered to Ukraine in any deal.

Really? So, for all of their big, brave words since February of 2022, they still expect the United States to do the heavy lifting. As we noted previously, the United Kingdom and France have held at least some discussions about sending their own troops to Ukraine, though such talks a year ago, while Mr Biden was still in office, but after Mr Trump had won the 2024 election, haven’t resulted in any troop deployments to Ukraine.

Concern is growing in Kyiv and other European capitals that Washington hasn’t detailed what it would do if Russia broke a potential peace deal and attacked Ukraine again.

If a peace deal was brokered, and Russia again attacked Ukraine, presumably after Russia rebuilt the losses from their army, the Unites States would still be 5,000 miles away from the battlefields. The NATO European forces are much closer, but will they risk war with Russia, with nuclear-armed Russia, over Ukraine? They certainly haven’t so far!

Were Ukraine to join NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty would obligate the United States and the European allies to come to Ukraine’s defense, but keeping Ukraine out of NATO is a primary goal for Russia; it’s very difficult to believe that Mr Putin would accept any peace deal which allowed Ukraine to join NATO.

The warnings, made in recent days, are a further example of European leaders’ attempts to insert themselves into peace talks that the U.S. has conducted by going directly to the Kremlin and Kyiv largely without European participation.

President Trump recognizes that European participation would only complicate and draw out matters.

The problem is actually a simple one: after 3½ years of war, Russia is slowly improving its battlefield positions. It certainly hasn’t been the quick war President Putin envisioned, or much of the West feared, but, slowly, Russia’s advantages in population and resources are beginning to tell, and the Ukrainian’s “dire shortage of manpower,” something which is not a recent development, and eventually Ukraine will lose unless the United States and/or NATO send actual ground troops to directly fight the Russians . . . and that’s World War III.

The European Union just scaled back a plan which would have used frozen Russian assets held primarily in Belgium to give loans — not grants, but loans — to Ukraine to fight Russia, but money does not equal soldiers, does not equal the actual combat troops Ukraine needs. The money could have purchased more weapons, primarily from the United States, but advanced weapons still require the personnel to operate them, and manpower is in short supply in that beleaguered country.

I am reminded of our own War Between the States, in which the smaller and lesser resourced Confederacy managed to win a several battles against the larger, more industrialized Union, but it was a war fought almost entirely in the South, in the Confederacy itself, which meant that the civilian casualties and economic damage of the war occurred primarily in the South, continually weakening the military position of the Confederacy.

That is the situation in the Russo-Ukrainian War: the civilians being killed are mostly Ukrainian, and the industrial and economic power of the combatants being degraded is mostly Ukrainian. President Zelenskyy wants American weapons which can strike deeper into Russia, to attack their infrastructure, something they’ve already been doing with drones, but that would not be enough to win the war for them, and the longer the war continues, the more people will be senselessly killed.

We could all wish that Ukraine could have not only fully resisted the Russian invasion and beaten them back, but that didn’t happen. As for me, I am not willing to see World War III over efforts to beat back Russia in Ukraine.

 

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Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right

The tweet screen captured to the right is just one of hundreds, if not more than hundreds, aimed by the pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas sympathizers and bots trying to pull on our heartstrings, at the plight of the poor, poor Palestinians, and the children! to generate relief aid and, of course, hatred of the Jooooos. I have little doubt that, had ubiquitous cell phones and social media existed in 1944, there’d be people telling us that the Germans were surely defeated by the end of the year, and that we didn’t really need to cross into the Third Reich, killing more innocents, and that we should offer Adolf Hitler and his cronies a ceasefire, to avoid more tragedy.

And horrors, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we’d have people wanting to try President Truman and General Curtis LeMay and Robert Oppenheimer — he was a Jew, you know! — for war crimes, even though the two nuclear attacks forced the Japanese militarists to surrender without having to invade Honshu.

That Hamas and the Palestinians started a war that they could not win, by breaking into Israel, slaughtering 1199 people and taking another 251 hostage doesn’t seem to get mentioned. We must have sympathy, we must have empathy, for the children.

And so we come to the very lovely Amanda Marcotte:

MAGA’s war on empathy was started by a woman

Allie Beth Stuckey weaponizes her gender to sell the idea of a cold-hearted Jesus

By Amanda Marcotte | Monday, December 1, 2025 | 6:45 AM EST

Thanks to Elon Musk, most Americans learned earlier this year that MAGA thinks empathy is evil. Cruelty isn’t the problem, the Tesla CEO claimed in an attempt to justify his turn toward authoritarian politics. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” he declared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in February.

As the billionaire was decimating much of the federal bureaucracy devoted to serving Americans, he said it was good to be heartless, comparing “the empathy response” to a computer bug. “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” he said, arguing counterintuitively that caring about others will somehow bring ruin to the entire human species.

As with much of the asinine ponderings coming from the Silicon Valley billionaire class, there’s a pseudo-intellectual rationale to prop up this nonsense. Musk got this “suicidal empathy” language from Gad Saad, a Canadian college professor who falsely presents himself as an “evolutionary behavioral scientist.” In fact, he’s a business professor with degrees in marketing and management, with no background in biology. But in 2024, Saad began pushing the notion that empathy has become a “cancer” because it allegedly has no “stopping mechanism” and will eventually kill its host — the human race. This, of course, is unscientific babbling, which is why the professor is a beloved guest on Rogan’s show. But it also cuts against basic common sense. Any study of wars, poverty and other manmade crises shows us that humanity still suffers from a lack of empathy, not a surfeit.

Given that Miss Marcotte’s degree is a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from St Edward’s University, it is at least questionable whether she should be taking judgements on how scientific other people’s work happens to be.

The quoted three paragraphs were actually Miss Marcotte’s introduction to a critique of “fundamentalist Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey” and her book “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion“. Reading her article, I got the impression that Miss Marcotte hadn’t actually read Mrs Stuckey’s book, but was basing her arguments on a 2022 podcast and her “hyper-feminine aesthetics,” and that she looks like “a harmless church girl,” as though Mrs Stuckey’s choice of clothes and style are themselves attacks on feminism, which is something on which we previously reported, noting Miss Marcotte’s trashing of Riley Gaines Barker because “she has a round face and a girlish demeanor” and “favors fluffy lace, pink outfits.”

You can read the rest of the cited article by following the hyperlink embedded in the title; there is no paywall on Salon.

But the point made by Mrs Stuckey is accurate, as we can see from the pro-Palestinian propaganda. We’re supposed to have great empathy for the children, as though those children are the victims of Israel, rather than victims of the choices the adults, including their parents, in Gaza made by starting a war that they couldn’t win, and in celebrating the attack on October 7, 2023, and do what? Send billions more to Gaza, inundate them with food and clothing and waterproof shelters, the things they lost for being stupid enough to attack Israel?

Of course there’s more. Well-meaning empathy created social programs that were fraudulently abused on both the large and the smaller scale. The Senate Democrats forced the closure of the federal government in an attempt to push huge, renewed subsidies for Obaminablecare, and only relented when they realized that the ongoing closure meant that EBT Cards — the new term for Food Stamps — were not refilled at the beginning of November. Illegal immigration surged under President Biden because of his very empathetic views, and that led to increased crime in our cities along with a few truly terrible murders of young women by illegals.

I’ve said it before, and according to my site software, this will be the 19th article with the same title: sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right. We are 38 trillion dollars in debt due to huge expenditures for social welfare programs, when we did just fine, thank you very much, before Lyndon Johnson and his “Great Society” schemes.

No. Just no. We have to stop having our government responsible for the care of individuals, we have to stop letting empathy for the poor and downtrodden drive our government policies and spending. We have to start being [insert plural slang term for the rectum here] again.

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Import the third world, get the third world. Is it any surprise that immigrants from a country in which stealing from the government is a way of life would steal from the government here?

Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) was just terribly, terribly upset that President Donald Trump used “hateful behavior and this type of language” when Mr Trump described him as “seriously retarded.”

“We have fought three decades to get this out of our school. Kids know better than to use it,” Walz told (NBC’s Kristen) Welker. “But look, this is what Donald Trump has done. He’s normalized this type of hateful behavior and this type of language. And mainly, look, at first, I think it’s just because he’s not a good human being, but secondly to distract from his incompetency.”

But when the Governor, and 2024 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, decided that junior high and high school boys needed tampon dispensers in their public school bathrooms, “seriously retarded” seems appropriate. Right now I’m reminded of season three, episode 8, of Shameless, where Sheila reclaims the dreaded “r” word. 🙂

Mr Trump wasn’t chastised, but ” target=”_blank”>doubled down on his characterization of Tampon Tim.

However now we have the stories, sourced from state workers, concerning how Governor Walz and the Minnesota state agencies ignored evidence of fraud perpetrated by Somali groups to raid federal funds. From The New York Times:

How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch

Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration.

By Ernesto Londoño, Reporting from Minneapolis | Saturday, November 29, 2025 | Updated: Sunday, November 30, 2025

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.

Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.

Note that the embedded link behind “rampant fraud” is dated April 9, 2024, when President Biden was still in office; this isn’t just some accusation by President Trump against his political enemies.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

The SBA estimates more than $200 billion of the $1.2 trillion it disbursed during the pandemic was obtained fraudulently, according to the Office of Inspector General.

Fraud was rampant during the panicdemic — not a typographical error, but exactly how I saw it — as it will always be whenever money from the government, federal, state, and local, is available, and while Minnesota is a blue state, it happens in states run by Republicans as well. From Breitbart:

The fraud has been so endemic in Minnesota that even the usually far-left Times is joining Breitbart News and calling it out. Indeed, the paper even noted that early on many liberals waved off the fraud as a “one-off abuse,” but as each new case rolled out from federal prosecutors the sense of alarm has grown and the blame is undeniable.

“Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided,” the Times reported.

The paper does not spare exposure of the Somali community.

Macalester College professor Ahmed Samatar, a Somali native, said that the fraud among Minnesota’s Somali migrants should not be surprising. The Times added that “Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.”

Import the third world, get the third world!

The fraud has been so deep that it has undermined all of the state’s welfare programs.

“No one will support these programs if they continue to be riddled with fraud,” federal prosecutor Joseph H. Thompson told the media. “We’re losing our way of life in Minnesota in a very real way.”

Hey, the losses to fraud are very acceptable if they can somehow end welfare programs! But I seriously doubt they will.

Naturally, the left leapt to the defense of the Somalis:

Above and beyond this massive fraud and theft, investigators are also finding that Somali migrants have sent millions in taxpayer dollars to the African Islamic terror group known as Al-Shabaab.

A long list of Democrats have been rushing to stick up for the Somali community in Minnesota, including Rep. Ilhan Omar and a growing number of local officials.

Well, of course they did. After all, to note that the (alleged) fraud committed (allegedly) by Somali groups is raaaaacist. Is it any surprise that our friends on the left would leap top their defense? After all, they want to fight President Trump on everything, including his policies of enforcing our immigration laws. But the Herald-Leader story referenced a white husband and wife caught, prosecuted, and convicted of stealing from the COVIDiocy relief funds.

It’s simple: a clear pile of our taxpayer funds goes not to government agencies, but non-governmental organizations which promise, promise! to do only good things with the money, but which are only lightly, if at all, supervised or audited. That is not to say that government employees can’t commit fraud, but the sheer number of NGOs receiving taxpayer dollars multiplies the opportunities for fraud exponentially.

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Democrisy: There’s nothing the Democrats hate more than President Trump actually enforcing the laws

On Wednesday, The Philadelphia Inquirer published a decent article on a wound care clinic in Kensington, the center of the drug trade in the City of Brotherly Love, and how they’ve been struggling with injuries caused by “tranq,” the veterinary tranquilizer xylazine, which was never approved for use in humans, which dealers have been using to ‘cut’ opioids, to give them a longer effect.

Inside a Kensington wound care clinic

Xylazine, which was never approved for human use, has wreaked havoc in Kensington. Amputations among opioid users have more than doubled.

by Aubrey Whelan | Wednesday, November 26, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

In a small clinic room at Mother of Mercy House on Allegheny Avenue in Kensington, Emma Anderson unwrapped a bandage from a man’s swollen hand.

“It hurts really bad in the cold,” the man said, wincing at the inflamed wound that covered most of a right-hand finger.

Cleaning it with saline solution proved so painful that Anderson, an EMT and St. Joseph’s University student, let the patient take the lead, wiping carefully at the yellowish-white tissue at the center of the wound.

It was his second time attending the wound care clinic at Mother of Mercy, the Catholic nonprofit that twice a week opens its doors to people with addiction dealing with the serious skin lesions, caused by the animal tranquilizer xylazine, that can develop into wounds so severe the only treatment is amputation.

There follows a long section telling readers about the work the Mother of Mercy House does, which is not necessary for this article, but I recommend readers to follow the embedded link to read it.

Much further down:

This year, medetomidine, another animal tranquilizer that causes severe withdrawal, has supplanted xylazine’s dominance in the Philadelphia area drug supply. Fewer patients addicted to opioids are visiting emergency rooms with soft-tissue damage, according to city data.

But it’s unknown how medetomidine affects those wounds, and there are still enough people suffering from them in Kensington, the epicenter of the city’s opioid crisis, that the clinic felt it necessary to increase its hours.

One doubts that the move away from xylazine by the drug dealers was meant for altruistic reasons. If medetomidine causes severe drug withdrawals, it would seem to be something to ‘encourage’ junkies to keep buying the junk.

But then there was Friday morning’s lead editorial:

It’s Trump — not service members — who could benefit from a reminder about following the law | Editorial

There’s nothing seditious about Democrats reminding military members not to follow unlawful orders.

by The Editorial Board | Friday, November 28, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

Six lawmakers, including two from Pennsylvania, had good reason to remind military members not to follow unlawful orders, given Donald Trump’s illicit history and recent actions, such as sending federal troops into cities and boat strikes that violate international law.

The six Democrats, who either served in the military or the intelligence community, posted a short video telling their former counterparts that “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

As William Teach noted, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), one of the six Democrats who made that short video, admitted:

To my knowledge, I am not aware of things that are illegal — but certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes, and everything related to Venezuela.

And even the Editorial Board backtracked somewhat:

For example, the legality of Trump’s boat strikes — which have killed more than 80 people — is dubious.

A secret U.S. Department of Justice memo reportedly blessed the strikes by claiming the U.S. is in an armed conflict with drug cartels. But members of Congress from both parties argue it is illegal to target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat. The United Nations’ human rights chief said the strikes violated international law.

It isn’t sedition for the six Democrats to make a video stating that American servicemen do not have to obey illegal orders, but their intent is clear: they wanted to cause some servicemembers to question orders that Senator Slotkin herself were not illegal. The Editorial Board certainly want you to believe that the strikes are illegal.

So, here we have the very same editors, who have read or should have read the previously cited article about the tremendous damage to which drug smuggling from Venezuela has done to our country. Those editors absolutely know about the devastation in Kensington, yet they are appalled, aghast, and outraged that President Trump is actually trying to do something to halt drug trafficking, just as they have waxed wroth about his efforts to reduce crime and stop illegal immigration and deport the illegals already here.

That President Trump sure is an evil genius! He’s managed to get the left to defend previously deported and returned again illegal immigrants accused of domestic violence, crime in our major cities, illegal immigration, and drug traffickers, all by the same people who told us that “No one is above the law” when the Democrats were trying to throw Mr Trump in jail.

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Journolism: CEO of Lenfest Institute for Journalism worries about Freedom of the Press when his own newspaper censors the news "What does not get printed is as important as what does" Jim Friedlich told us, but The Philadelphia Inquirer frequently doesn't print the politically incorrect

Jim Friedlich is Chief Executive Officer and executive director of the Leftist, oops, sorry, Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns what I have sometimes called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.. In this morning’s newspaper, he is “Giving thanks — and offering up a prayer — for America’s free press: On this, more than any Thanksgiving in memory, a free and independent American press seems in peril.” It’s mostly boilerplate stuff, such as claiming that President Trump’s attempt to eliminate the Voice of America as somehow an attack on freedom of the Press, as though VOA is somehow not a government body rather than an independent news source. He decries the defunding of the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, even though both still exist and can survive the way every other broadcaster survives, by selling advertising.

But this is the line which attracted most of my attention:

What does not get printed is as important as what does. The palpable chill of partisan press criticism has meant the self-censorship of even some of the nation’s wealthiest newspaper owners.

“What does not get printed”? Such as the censorship and self-censorship of virtually every outlet among the credentialed media of then-President Joe Biden’s visibly declining mental status? Remember our coverage of Jake Tapper‘s and Alex Thompson‘s book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again? Only a fool would believe that the major television news networks, that the reporters of The New York Times and The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times didn’t see the President’s slips, falls, gaffes, and zoning out. That it was visible to all who paid attention is attested to by conservatives having seen it and publishing it and tweeting it out, but, alas! the credentialed media pooh-poohed all of that, and told their readership and audiences that it was nothing, that maybe Mr Biden had lost a step physically but mentally he was, according to Mary Peltola, “one of the smartest, sharpest people I’ve met in DC.” That was just before the disastrous debate on June 27, 2024. After the debate, the Associated Press tried to tell us that Mr Biden was “Often sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful,” but most of the media admitted that his debate performance was a disaster, and, worst of all, the American public saw it, in ways the credentialed media couldn’t cover up.

I asked the Inquirer’s Will Bunch, on Bluesky, if there was “any discussion in the newsroom concerning Mr Biden’s growing incapacity before it all blew up during the debate?” but of course I didn’t get a response.

It’s simple: to the credentialed media, President Biden was running for re-election, and nothing, nothing! was more important than defeating the evil Donald Trump. And Mr Friedlich’s newspaper was definitely in the forefront of that effort: following the debate, the Editorial Board of The New York Times said, “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race,” to which the Editorial Board of the Inquirer replied, “To serve his country, Donald Trump should leave the race.”

So, Mr Friedlich, I had to laugh when you wrote what does not get printed is as important as what does. Your own newspaper chose not to report on the mental condition of the 46th President of the United States, at the time it was most important, when he was running for re-election, but Mr Bunch keeps crying that Mr “Trump’s rapidly deteriorating mental state remains mostly off-limits for the elite media. It’s a massive error of omission that the world will look back on and regret.” Perhaps the Lenfest Institute for Journalism needs to push the newspaper to actually engage in journalism.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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Will these bad guys finally do some serious time?

Will the left be mad about this as well? They’ve been defending drug runners since President Trump has ordered action to sink their boats in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of America, so this ought to get them grinding their teeth as well. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

How law enforcement built a sprawling case against a longstanding Kensington drug gang

Philly police and federal authorities used wiretaps, cameras, and confidential informants to target dealers on Weymouth Street.

by Chris Palmer and Jesse Bunch | Tuesday, November 25, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST

Ramon Roman-Montanez knew the police were watching.

One day last April, as Roman-Montanez prepared to hand out free drug samples to users on Weymouth Street — a common tactic that dealers use to attract customers — he stood in the middle of the Kensington block and spotted a problem.

The cops had put up a pole camera.

Using binoculars, Roman-Montanez scouted out the new device at the end of the block, prosecutors said in court documents. But he had a business to run — and so, after talking with a few associates in the street, he decided that giveaway day would move forward as planned.

Clearly, Mr Roman-Montanez and his “associates” — is that the new euphemism for gang-banger? — did not see it as very much of a problem, not in a city in which George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police hating Larry Krasner is the District Attorney. If caught, what would they get, a slap on the wrist?

Whatever their thought processes, they (allegedly) went ahead and did it.

The camera, however, was just one hint of what authorities now say was a sprawling, multiyear investigation into the gang Roman-Montanez helped lead — a group that sold thousands of doses of heroin, fentanyl, crack, and cocaine over the course of more than a decade, and effectively took over a residential block in a neighborhood that has long suffered from crime, open-air drug dealing, and neglect.

The results of the probe came to light last month, when FBI Director Kash Patel came to Philadelphia to announce that 33 people, including Roman-Montanez, had been indicted for drug crimes. Patel called the case a model for law enforcement across the country, and an example of how to take out a drug gang terrorizing a community.

The most important part of this? This is a federal case, so Mr Krasner can’t deal out lenient plea bargains!

In August, for example, Roman-Montanez was charged in state court with drug possession and related crimes after police found fentanyl, crack, and $20,000 in cash in his house — the result of a raid on Weymouth Street that was part of the investigation into his gang.

But a few weeks later, his attorneys persuaded a Philadelphia judge to reduce his bail and he walked out of jail. The 40-year-old — who federal prosecutors now say was the de facto chief operating officer of one of the city’s biggest drug conspiracies — was only taken back into custody this month, when federal authorities unsealed his indictment.

No wonder Mr Roman-Montanez didn’t see much downside: in the state prosecution, which means the prosecution under Mr Krasner, nothing happened.

Other interesting paragraphs:

In 2020, Angel Rios-Valentin was convicted in federal court of illegal gun possession after officers found him carrying a loaded handgun that he’d taken from Roman-Montanez’s house. He was sentenced to five years in prison and was on supervised release when he was arrested again last month.

Police found four guns in Rios-Valentin’s house, a discovery that prosecutors said showed his ongoing commitment to the gang.

Roman-Montanez, meanwhile, was arrested twice in the last three years, court documents show — but in both cases managed to avoid significant consequences.

In October 2022, police searched his house and found 96 grams of fentanyl, four loaded guns, and nearly $125,000 in cash, prosecutors said. Roman-Montanez was charged in state court, but the case was withdrawn.

The article continued to tell us that scheduling issues with attorneys and witnesses delayed proceedings for more than a year, and prosecutors — there’s that Mr Krasner again! — withdrew the charges.

The investigation has dragged on for years, and the (alleged) principals managed to distribute tons of drugs into Kensington. There’s a reason that neighborhood is internationally infamous — the government of Mexico has actually used photos of Kensington in ads to discourage drug use in Mexico! — and is simply a waste case, because years and years of law enforcement looking the other way, the city government being oh-so-sympathetic as far as drug use and junkies are concerned, have left the bad guys in charge, the addicts littering the streets, and the decent people living there stuck in their homes, afraid to come out of doors any more often than absolutely necessary. After eight years of neglect under former Mayor Jim Kenney, current Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins has made some moves to do something about the neighborhood, but Mr Krasner has attempted to throw roadblocks into that effort where he can.

The federal investigation dates from the beginning of President Trump’s first term, continued through the Joe Biden years, and finally, nine months into Mr Trump’s second term things are getting done. I only have to wonder how quickly new ‘entrepreneurs’ will replace the 33 gang-bangers now under arrest.

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World War III Watch: So many people want to fight, fight, fight for Ukraine who never actually go to Ukraine and fight

We noted, on Saturday, that the proposed peace plan is “a horrible deal for Ukraine, no doubt about that. But it does one thing: it stops the killing! It would be very dispassionate to suggest that Ukraine should keep on fighting, and its people keep on dying, if there were any reasonable prospect that they could eventually win the war.” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin opined against it, and wants President Donald Trump, who she clearly hates, to send Patriot missiles and other weaponry to Ukraine, but she, like so many other people who want to help Ukraine, never told us what it would take for Ukraine to actually win its war against Russia.

And late Sunday, the Inky published a straight news story on a demonstration by Ukrainian Americans:

Philadelphia’s Ukrainian American community rebukes proposed Russia-Ukraine peace plan

Rallygoers outside a North Philadelphia Ukrainian American club condemned Sunday a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine. The plan has been criticized for capitulating to Russia’s demands.

by Maggie Prosser | Sunday, November 23, 2025 | 4:38 PM EST

About 60 people gathered at a North Philadelphia Ukrainian American club on Sunday afternoon to condemn a U.S.-brokered proposal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Waving Ukrainian flags and hoisting signs that read, “Appeasement Isn’t Peace,” demonstrators outside the Ukrainian American Citizens’ Association described the plan as a laughable, “copy-and-paste” of Russia’s demands, signaling America’s willingness to capitulate to the Kremlin.

The peace deal put together by Washington and Moscow calls for Ukraine to cede territory, reduce its military, and give up on NATO membership — stipulations that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has categorically rejected in the past.

And here comes the money line:

“Nobody in their right mind would ask a country to give up its territory,
its military, its freedoms,” said Ulana Mazurkevich, president of the Philadelphia-based Ukrainian Human Rights Committee. “They do not know Ukrainians. … We will not give up — we fight, we fight, we fight.”

Really? Who’s this “we” about whom President Mazurkevich speaks? In the photograph accompanying the article, which you can see as part of the Inquirer’s tweet reproduced above — I prefer to use tweets as article illustrations, because those tweets are not under copyright, and can specifically be embedded — there are several men and women as part of that about 60 people demonstrating, but as part of “we fight, we fight, we fight,” they are doing so in North Philly, not on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Even Mrs Rubin admitted Ukraine’s “dire shortage of man power,” a shortage exacerbated by all of the Ukrainians not living in Ukraine, not fighting in Ukraine. We have at least twice mentioned that the vocal and vociferous supporters of the Palestinians certainly didn’t actually go to Gaza to fight the Israelis, and I have to ask here: why aren’t these Ukrainians in Philly picking up a rifle and heading to Kiev? Don’t tell me that you fight, you fight, you fight if you aren’t there, actually fighting.

We noted, eleven months ago, a Washington Post article telling readers about “exhausted soldiers” on the front lines and men in their late thirties, and their forties, and their fifties, on the front lines, of a few women on the front lines, not the soldiers the Kiev government would prefer to have, but the ones they do have.

It’s easy to say “we fight, we fight, we fight,” when you are not the ones out there actually fighting. It’s easy for the brave people in the United States and the capitals of democratic Europe, people who are not facing the bullets and bombs of the Russian army to advocate for continuing the war.

David J Kramer, Executive Director of the George w Bush Institute and Vice President of the George W Bush Presidential Center, argued:

The United States and the democratic community of nations must stand with Ukraine against Russia’s brutal, forcible seizure of Ukrainian territory. Ukraine represents the frontline of freedom, and its heroic citizens, who endure deadly and daily Russian bombardments and who have pushed back against a much larger military, deserve Western support. If not stopped in Ukraine, Putin will target other nations, which he already has been doing, but more aggressively. If we want to prevent the possibility of a Chinese attack against Taiwan, an important way to do so is by showing unstinting backing for Ukraine and imposing greater costs on Russia and its accomplices.

The United States should not be discussing the future of U.S.-Russian relations while Russian missiles and drones continue to wreak havoc on Ukraine, killing innocent civilians and trying to freeze and force the population into submission with winter coming.

The 28-point plan should be dropped and replaced with a simple one-point plan: Russia, get out of Ukraine!

It’s easy to make those arguments from the safety of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It’s easy to say that Russia must “get out of Ukraine” when he’s not there to force such. It’s beyond naïve to think that Russia would somehow accept a military defeat — “get out of Ukraine” — that no one has inflicted on them.

Mr Kramer’s site biography tells us that he is ” a leading expert on Russia and Ukraine,” and lists all sorts of impressive credentials, but his policy proposals amount to giving Ukraine more weapons and more money, but conspicuously avoids the only thing that could actually help Ukraine win, sending actual United States or NATO ground troops to directly fight the Russians. There is virtually no support for doing that, as Mr Kramer certainly knows, irrespective of what he might believe in his heart. He wants to:

Seek accountability for Russian war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Putin, after all, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for his kidnapping of Ukrainian children

when a man who earned “his M.A. in Soviet studies from Harvard University and his B.A. in Soviet Studies and Political Science from Tufts University” has to know that war crimes can only be prosecuted on men who led nations and lost, and were then captured. Does Mr Kramer seriously believe that we can capture and drag Vladimir Putin before the bar? You’d have to spent a lot of time in a bar to think that!

Russia invasion of Ukraine is a terrible thing, something we all hate, but I have yet to see anyone present an actual plan to enable Ukraine to win the war. Simply sending money and weapons to a nation whose army has a “dire shortage of man power” is no plan at all.